We interview Elizabeth Dillenburg about her book, Empire's Daughters: Girlhood, Whiteness, and the Colonial Project
Our member, Dr. Elizabeth Dillenburg (Ohio State University at Newark, United States), talks about her new book, Empire's Daughters: Girlhood, Whiteness, and the Colonial Project (Manchester University Press, 2024).
Q: What is this book about?
Empire's Daughters uncovers the ways in which girls and ideas of girlhood were central to the construction of colonial identities and societies and ideas of whiteness. Girls were heralded as empire builders and crucial to the creation and maintenance of class, gender, and racial hierarchies. They participated in the empire as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators of colonial knowledge. Yet girls’ involvement in the empire was anything but straightforward. They not only supported—directly and indirectly—racialized systems of colonial power but also resisted them.
To explore these complexities of girls’ participation in the empire, my book examines the Girls’ Friendly Society, an organisation that emerged in late Victorian Britain and developed into a global society with branches throughout the empire. The book charts the society’s origins and growth through its later decline in the interwar era. It explores how, through its multifaceted imperial education and emigration programmes, the society constructed ideas of girlhood, race, and empire that then circulated globally.
The book employs a multi-sited framework that examines girlhood in different areas of the empire, including Britain, India, South Africa, and Australia, and utilizes a range of sources, including correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, and newsletters, to provide new insights into girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism. Through this study of the Girls’ Friendly Society, Empire’s Daughters explores the micropolitics of colonialism and whiteness and argues that understandings of colonialism remain incomplete without considerations of girls and girlhood.
Q: What made you write this book?
This project originated around fifteen years ago when I was a graduate student and was sparked by my desire to understand the roles girls had in the British empire and how girls’ lives and ideas of girlhood were shaped by British imperialism. My interest in this topic was inspired by a growing body of scholarship on childhood and empire. Despite the proliferation of scholarship, I realized that childhood is often treated as a ‘gender neutral’ concept. The history of childhood consequently becomes the history of boyhood, with boys’ lives taken as the normative experience of childhood and girls relegated to a footnote, paragraph, or chapter in broader studies of childhood, especially in studies of colonial childhoods.
In writing Empire’s Daughters, I wanted to challenge that marginalization and shine a light on these figures overlooked in the studies of imperial history. Girls are often regarded as inconsequential or peripheral to the imperial enterprise, if not altogether invisible, but I wanted to bring them to the centre of this history.
What were the experiences of empire like for girls? How did they understand and engage with the empire and make sense of their place in it? What roles did they have in the imperial project? These were some of the questions that animated the writing of my book.
An excerpt from Chapter 3 ('Class, Race, and Competing Objectives within Girls' Emigration Programmes):
In February 1902, Eliza Hobbs and Eliza Cook appeared before a magistrate’s court in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), charged with infringement of the Masters’ and Servants’ Ordinance. They had arrived in June 1901 and were contracted to work as servants for the Robinson household for a minimum of two years. However, upon their arrival, Hobbs and Cook found life in Rhodesia laborious, alien, and full of hardships, very different from the ‘Great Garden’ promised in emigration propaganda. Hobbs wrote to Ellen Joyce and Edith Lyttelton Gell, who had helped arrange her passage, about the difficulties in adjusting to life in Bulawayo and her sense of loneliness and isolation, confiding: ‘I cannot tell you how earnestly I have longed for one friend since I have been here’. She described the challenges of ‘be[ing] in a strange land penniless’ and expressed resentment at the false promises of emigration propaganda (Letter from Eliza Hobbs to ‘Honoured Madam’, 20 January 1902, Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, D3287/67/11/84). In contrast to finding a land full of sunshine with greater freedom and opportunities, Hobbs related to Joyce: ‘I must say I do dislike the little I have seen of S. Africa’. She reiterated this belief in a later letter, concluding: ‘I cannot see that servants should come to a strange place to be treated just anyhow’ (Letter from Eliza Hobbs to ‘Honoured Madam’, 23 May 1902, Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, D3287/67/11/79). These frustrations were compounded by Hobbs’s difficult relationship with her mistress, Sidonia Robinson, whom Hobbs described as ‘dreadful to live with’ (Letter from Eliza Hobbs to ‘Honoured Madam’, 20 January 1902). Hobbs and Cook ultimately decided to leave their situations eight months after their arrival. They were eventually arrested, and at the trial, Hobbs testified that she would rather ‘go to prison’ than return to work for Mrs. Robinson, stating that, if she was compelled to stay, it would mean that ‘the law seems to uphold tyranny’ (Letter from Eliza Hobbs to ‘Honoured Madam’, 20 January 1902). She pleaded her case to Joyce, writing ‘we have done no crime, only took ourselves out of an unhappy life’ (Letter from Eliza Hobbs to ‘Honoured Madam [Ellen Joyce]’, 11 February 1902, Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, D3287/67/11/79). The magistrate ruled in favour of Robinson and fined Hobbs and Cook £2 and ordered them to fulfil their contracts and return to work for the Robinsons. Hobbs lamented the verdict and broader legal system, writing: ‘it is not justice, the law seems made for monied people’ (Letter from Eliza Hobbs to ‘Honoured Madam’, 23 May 1902). Ultimately Robinson released Hobbs from her contract, but, unable to pay for her passage back to England, Hobbs remained in Bulawayo and found a new position as a housekeeper (Letter from Eliza Hobbs to ‘Honoured Madam’, 23 May 1902).
Proponents framed emigration in terms of imperial duty, but as the cases of Eliza Hobbs and Eliza Cook demonstrate, emigrants cared little for these broader imperial objectives and instead viewed emigration in terms of their own interests and as a means to achieving their personal goals. The trials of Eliza Hobbs and Eliza Cook underscore inherent contradictions within emigration ideology and the limitations of imperial ideals. Organisations like the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) had a clear view of how colonial societies should be structured and the role of girls in them. They heralded girls as empire builders and cultural and racial bulwarks, but within shifting colonial contexts this role was called into question, and, as the cases of Hobbs and Cook demonstrate, girls did not always adhere to prescribed roles.
The previous chapter examined how whiteness was central to imaginings of settler colonial societies, evidenced in plays, pageants, newsletters, and scrapbooks produced by the GFS; this chapter considers how the GFS tried to make these imaginings a reality through its emigration programmes, which sought to reproduce whiteness abroad through populating and building up settler societies. The chapter begins by outlining the wider contexts in which the GFS’s emigration programmes emerged and situates their development in relation to similar emigration schemes for girls that evolved over the course of the nineteenth century. It then traces the different motives that informed the development of the GFS’s programmes. Child rescue and emigration organisations argued for the necessity of removing girls from the perceived dangers of poverty and urban life in England to the more wholesome environment of the colonies. Girls also provided valuable labour to colonial societies and were integral in making the empire white by ensuring the construction of English households abroad. Despite these compelling motives and the high demand for emigrants in settler colonies, the GFS and other emigration organisations faced myriad difficulties, which were rooted in broader class and racial anxieties and specifically concerns about the whiteness of emigrants and white prestige in colonial societies. These challenges reveal the competing, rather than complimentary, objectives among emigration organisers, settlers, and girl migrants and fault lines within emigration programmes and the settler colonial project.
The book is available open access.